How To Do Perfect SEO Audit for Your Website or Blog (Ultimate Guide)

Today, Every blogger, webmaster want to build influence and exposure of their blog, they can drive more traffic and sales.

Right?

Now,

There is the only way to get traffic is “SEO” because search engines are the best and the only way of getting more targeted (as well as free) visitors. Everyone wants to rank higher on the search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

But how many of them can do that successfully?

Not all of them! Right?

Why?

Because they don’t have either proper knowledge about SEO or they don’t know how to implement the strategies.

Also, the majority of those people don’t know the cause of their bad SEO of their site and how to come out from it.

So, here comes the term “SEO Audit”

Now probably you’re thinking, What is SEO Audit and how to perform it for my blog?

Don’t worry, this is the complete guide to it. Just read and Implement it.

Nobody can exactly tell you how to rank on 1st position but trust me if you have the quality blog (content, links, and few other things) you’ll be surely on top. So you started a blog/business online and had done with the content part. Now comes the SEO part, maybe you had completed it too. Maybe you did nicely, or you had some mistakes. But, the point is you have to confirm that your site is perfectly SEO optimized.

The only way to figure it out is to run an SEO Audit of your website. Today I’m here to share with you a complete step by step guide to do a proper SEO Audit of your website.

So, Let’s get started.

Contents [Hide]

• Step By Step Guide to Perform a Perfect SEO Audit
• Step-1: Check Accessibility
  • Robots.txt
  • HTTP Status Codes
  • XML Sitemaps
  • Site Speed
• Step-2: Check Indexibility
  • Site: Command
  • Index Sanity Checks
  • Brand Searches
• Step-3: Check your On Page SEO
  • URL
  • Content
  • Titles
  • Meta Descriptions
  • Images
  • Links
• Step-4: Check your Off Page SEO
  • Backlinks
  • Authority
  • Social Engagement
  • Trustworthiness
• Over to You

Step By Step Guide to Perform a Perfect SEO Audit

For making it simple, I divided this audit process into multiple sections:

Step-1: Check Accessibility

If search engines and users can’t access your site, that means your site does not exist. So you should make sure your site’s pages are accessible for users as well as search engines.

So now you must be wondering how to make the pages accessible?

Let me tell you Accessibility can be made by many ways, I’ll make it clear for you.

• Robots.txt

The robots.txt file is used to tell search engines which pages should accessible and which are not. You can also disallow google crawlers with this file.

So you must check that, and make sure that it’s not restricting access to important sections of your site.

• HTTP Status Codes

Search engines and users are unable to access your site’s content if you have URLs that return errors. For example, 404 and 403 are the most common errors.

Make sure any of you pages don’t have these types of errors.

• XML Sitemaps

Your site’s XML Sitemap provides a roadmap for search engine crawlers to ensure they can easily find all of your site’s pages.

It also helps crawlers to make a canonical way to index your website contents, so make sure you have made a proper sitemap and submitted to google.

• Site Speed

Probably, you heard that “site loading time is a major ranking factor in SEO“. And, that’s true. Don’t ignore this.

If your site loading time is more than 3 seconds, then try to fix it. You can easily do that. For example, Compress CSS and Javascript, Use compressed images, Try to make your page smaller in size, Use fewer plugins, and most important use CDN (Content Delivery Network), etc.

The faster it loads, higher it will be accessible to the search engine and users.

Step-2: Check Indexibility

Once the search engine crawlers had completed the crawling of your website, then comes the next part, i.e., Indexing.

Now all the pages that are crawled by the crawlers will be indexed in the search engine results.

You must check that your site is indexed by search engines (Google) or not. There are many ways for checking indexability.

• Site: Command

This is the most common way to check that your website is indexed or not. You can also use this command to get a very rough estimate for the number of pages that are indexed by a given search engine.

• Index Sanity Checks

The “site:” command allows us to look at indexability from a very high level. Now, we need to be a little more granular. Specifically, we need to make sure the search engines are indexing the site’s most important pages.

• Brand Searches

You have successfully checked that your website and it’s important pages are indexed or not. Now, another thing you’ve to do is check whether your site is indexed by the brand name or not.

I mean that you should check that your site is ranking well for your brand name or not?

If not then this would surely affect your brand SEO. Try to fix it out. (Quick fix: Get links as your brand name anchor text)

Step-3: Check your On Page SEO

While you had completed the first and second step (the accessibility and indexing of your website), now you must have a view over your On Page SEO.

It is important because it’s the characteristics of your site pages on the basis of which they are ranked and indexed in search engines.

In general, the page level analysis is useful for identifying specific examples of optimization opportunities, and the domain level analysis helps define the level of effort necessary to make site-wide corrections.

In this section, we would be discussing the On Page SEO sites where you must check.

• URL

They are one of the major On Page SEO part because a URL is the entry point to a page’s content and it’s a logical place to begin our on-page analysis.

• When analyzing the URL for a given page, some things you must pay attention to are:
• Make your URL user-friendly and short.
• Check that whether the URL contains the keywords or not.
• You are advised to use Static URL’s and to avoid excessive parameters.
• Make sure that URL isn’t using hyphens in between words.

Make sure to check above points.

• Content

Content is king. Right?

So you must have an eye on your content part of the website. Does your content comply with the important sections for proper SEO?

Make sure you have implemented the following things:

• Does the page contain substantive content?
• Is the content valuable for readers?
• Does the content contain targeted keywords?
• Does the content minimize spelling and grammatical errors?
• Is the content easily readable?

If your answers to all of these questions are in “YES” then let me congratulate you because your content is already optimized and has no issues with it.

But if you have something missing in content as from the above questions then it needs to improve.

• Titles

A page’s title is its single most identifying characteristic. It’s what appears first in the search engine results, and it’s often the first thing people notice on the social media. Thus, it’s extremely important to evaluate the perfect titles on your site.

• Meta Descriptions

Make sure that your pages of your website have proper meta descriptions. Well, according to google…

“A page’s meta description doesn’t explicitly act as a ranking factor, but it does affect the page’s click-through rate in the search engine results.”

So, check that out your meta descriptions are not missed (If you miss that then it will show your first few sentences by default), and keywords are placed within it. Also, it should describe what the content is all about.

• Images

Images say that a thousand words can’t, so check this and make sure that your pages have proper and relevant images added to them with proper attributes.

With attributes I mean to say the meta data, try to write relevant and proper meta data within the images.

• Links

When one page links to another, that link is an endorsement of the receiving page’s quality. Thus, an important part of the audit is making sure your site links to other high-quality sites.

Here comes the term link building. Make sure to build links from high-quality sites. If you get links from bad, irrelevant, and spammy sites, then your sites can be penalized.

Here is my complete guide to On Page SEO: Check it out.

Step-4: Check your Off Page SEO

Every blogger knows that the Off page SEO is equally important as that of On page. In some cases Off page SEO have more value than On Page.

So you should also check the whole Off Page optimization of your blog or site.

• Backlinks

Search engines determine the quality of a website through its backlink profile. I.e., how many backlinks does a site have and from where and from which kind of sites?

Are those links are relevant? High quality? What is the anchor text distribution? etc.

Don’t think google goes behind the number and building more links to your site can help you to improve your OFF page SEO. Instead, you’ll be penalized if you’ll be found doing this.

Search engines go behind the quality of the link, I mean the authority, page juice and quality of the source from where the backlink is coming from.

You are recommended to have clean and high-quality backlinks to your site.

• Authority

A site’s authority is determined by a combination of factors (e.g., the quality and quantity of backlinks, its popularity, its trustworthiness, etc.)

You can build your authority by regular updating of your site and by building high-quality backlinks. On the other side maintaining the quality of your website is highly recommended.

• Social Engagement

Social media is becoming the trend and the place where you can drive huge traffic. It’s not just a source of traffic it’s a determining factor too.

Yes! It is one of the Off Page SEO factors.

The more social your business/website is, the better level of trust or exposure it will get. It will also improve your website SEO.

Try to increase user engagement on facebook and twitter by being regular on it. Also, focus on the social media sites where your targeted visitors hang out.

• Trustworthiness

People will only go to your site if they trust you.  Am I Right?

Same happened with the search engines too. They will also give you more preference and exposure only if they trust you.

The trustworthiness of a website is a very subjective metric because all individuals have their own unique interpretation of trust.

To avoid these personal biases, it’s easier to identify behavior that is commonly accepted as being untrustworthy.

I recommend you to maintain your trust level by avoiding the following things:

• Spamming
• Cloaking
• Keyword Stuffing
• Over optimizing
• Thin content

So we have completed the 4th step of SEO Audit.

Over to You

You have completed the SEO audit with each and every part of your website. And if everything is fine, you’ll surely get better results in the upcoming days.

This was all about How to do perfect SEO Audit for your website, and I hope you got everything from this ultimate guide. I covered each and every step for doing a proper SEO audit.

Let me know what you think about this guide. Is it helpful for you? Also, don’t forget to share this guide on your social networks.